The processing of live fowl to produce packaged fowl ready for use by restaurants or other consumers typically entails stunning, killing, beheading, bleeding, scalding, plucking, eviscerating, washing, chilling, and packing the fowl for shipment to the consumer. During processing the opportunity for disease transmission is great. At existing processing rates of from 50 to more than 90 birds per minute, disease transmission occurs when the blood, guts and fecal matter of disease carrying birds are splattered onto noncontaminated birds. Disease transmission also arises because the equipment is shared by all the birds, with every bird being eviscerated with the same blade and cooled in the same communal chilling tank. Thus the problem of disease transmission is pervasive, with studies showing that 60% of the fowl processed in the United States is contaminated with pathogenic bacteria.
A number of methods have been used to solve this problem. These usually involve treatment at the chiller water stage, since by that stage all extraneous matter, such as fecal matter, blood, guts, and components of the digestive track of the bird, have been removed, thus decreasing the likelihood of further contamination past the chiller tank. Those treatment methods include raising the chiller water pH to levels that destroy bacteria or prevent their development, chlorinating the chiller water to kill the pathogenic organisms, and providing a chiller water having 3% hydrogen peroxide to retard microbial growth.
None of these is completely satisfactory; each has its own shortcoming, such as altering the color, taste, or texture of the flesh or of the skin. Hydrogen peroxide, for example, reacts with the enzyme catalase to produce a gas which becomes trapped in the tissue of the fowl, causing the fowl to have a bloated appearance. Moreover, the hydrogen peroxide can adversely affect the skin, either by bleaching it to an objectionable white color or by making it rubbery, or by doing both.
Another peroxide, peracetic acid has been used as a disinfectant for cleaning fowl processing equipment; it has also been used as a bactericide for killing the bacteria in the liquid soaked up by the absorbent pad in wrapped fowl packages, with a barrier layer between the peracetic acid and the fowl to keep the peracetic acid from contacting the fowl. Nevertheless, fowl has never been contacted directly with peracetic acid, perhaps because of an adverse experience with hydrogen peroxide.